Cardinal Bernard F. Law reinstated the Rev. Ronald H. Paquin to priestly
duties as recently as 1998, despite numerous detailed complaints of molestation
against the priest and substantial monetary settlements to Paquin's accusers,
according to internal church documents made available to the Globe.

According to the documents, between 1990 and 1996 there were 13 complaints
to the archdiocese alleging sexual misbehavior by Paquin over the previous
two decades. The accusations were filled with grim detail about how Paquin
allegedly plied boys with gifts and liquor before molesting and orally
raping them - charges that prompted the church to make payments to his
victims.

The behavior was found to be so repugnant and the pattern of abuse so
clear that a church review board and a top deputy to Law urged that Paquin
be dismissed from the priesthood, though they later changed their minds
and said he should be given a second chance.

In 1990, after years of warnings that Paquin was molesting children in
Methuen and Haverhill, the archdiocese had removed him as associate pastor
at St. John the Baptist Church in Haverhill. Paquin was sent for extended
treatment in Maryland, then lived at a home for problem priests in Milton.

The documents show that Law's 1998 decision allowing Paquin to return
to duty as a chaplain at a Cambridge hospital was made at the urging of
another priest who had himself been removed from parish work for allegedly
molesting children.

"I know that there have been some very difficult moments for you,"
Law wrote to Paquin in a July 11, 1998 letter. "I trust that your
own continued vigilance and support of competent professionals will allow
you to begin a new phase of ministry in the Archdiocese."

Paquin was warned that he could not work with minors, and the hospital,
Youville Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Cambridge, was informed
of his background.

Law's letter came six months after he had defrocked the Rev. John J.
Geoghan, the since-convicted child molester whose case touched off the
clergy sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church.

Paquin's reinstatement is one in a string of decisions, by Law and his
top deputies, that permitted some priests with records of serial sexual
misconduct to return to active ministry after being found out and treated.
In Paquin's case, the reassignment was permitted under the sexual abuse
policy that Law promulgated in 1993. It remained in place until Law declared
a "zero tolerance" policy in January.

But the documents show the church knew that Paquin had been the target
of multiple complaints of sex abuse. In one 1995 letter, the Rev. Brian
M. Flatley, an aide to Law, wrote to the cardinal that the father of one
Paquin victim "is in contact with other victims of Father Paquin
(although he seems unaware of just how many there are.)"

Donna M. Morrissey, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, declined comment
on the Paquin documents, saying the case is in litigation.

Law's letter to Paquin was among hundreds of pages of church documents
obtained during litigation by Jeffrey A. Newman, a Boston lawyer who represents
several of Paquin's victims in lawsuits against the archdiocese. Newman
obtained the documents last month and has a motion before the court to
put the documents on record.

Before Law reassigned Paquin as a chaplain, the archdiocese had already
settled six of the 13 reported molestation cases for more than $500,000
according to the documents and interviews by the Globe.

It was not until 2000 that Paquin was permanently removed from service,
after the archdiocese received several more complaints of past abuse against
him, including one from a Dracut man who expressed dismay that Paquin
was still working as a priest, and threatened to go to the press, according
to the documents.

Paquin, 59, was indicted on three counts of rape of a child on May 15
and is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail in Essex County House of Correction.
At Paquin's arraignment, Essex Assistant District Attorney William E.
Fallon said Paquin established a relationship of trust with the alleged
victim and his family, and took advantage of it to molest the youth beginning
when he was 11, in 1989. Paquin has pleaded not guilty.

The documents confirm a report by the Globe in April that Paquin's superiors
suspected or knew about his sexual exploitation of youngsters for years
before anything was done. But the records also show that one superior,
who had received complaints from three people about Paquin and assured
them he would notify the archdiocese, did not do so.

The Rev. Allen E. Roche, the pastor at St. Monica's Church in Methuen,
where Paquin was an associate pastor for eight years after his 1973 ordination,
is quoted in an archdiocesan memorandum as saying he never informed the
archdiocese even though he had heard repeated reports that Paquin had
taken young boys to his rectory bedroom.

According to a memorandum prepared by Sister Rita V. McCarthy, a Chancery
official who investigated allegations against priests, Roche told her
two years before his death in 1997 "that he had not liked the idea"
of Paquin taking boys to his room, and he told her that at least one youth
had complained to him that Paquin molested him in the room.

Roche said he was nearing retirement, according to the memo, and decided
to do nothing about his concerns. McCarthy also wrote that the same boy
who complained to Roche also told the Rev. James M. Carroll of the incident.
Carroll, who had taken Paquin's place at St. Monica's, relayed the information
to Roche, but according to McCarthy, "again nothing was done."

The same memo also cites a 1981 auto accident, after Paquin's transfer
to Haverhill, in which one of four teenage boys Paquin took to a New Hampshire
ski chalet died after Paquin lost control of the car on a New Hampshire
highway. Roche again considered telling the archdiocese about the earlier
allegations, but, McCarthy wrote, "The timing was not right so nothing
was done at that time."

The Globe reported in April that three people quoted Roche as saying
that he had passed on complaints to the archdiocese. The three included
a parishioner who had served as the sexual assault officer for the Methuen
Police Department; Robert Bartlett, one of Paquin's alleged victims; and
Carroll.

In 1988, the Rev. Frederick E. Sweeney became suspicious about Paquin's
involvement with boys soon after taking over as pastor of St. John's in
Haverhill, where Paquin had been working as associate pastor since 1981.

Three months after complaining to archdiocesan officials about Paquin,
two young men, one of whom had allegedly been abused by Paquin, approached
Sweeney with information about the priest.

After they also met with the Rev. John B. McCormack, who headed the archdiocese's
office of clergy abuse, McCormack informed Paquin in September 1990 that
he was being removed from St. John's Church and sent for treatment to
St. Luke's Institute in Maryland.

According to the documents, McCormack, who is now bishop of the Manchester,
N.H., diocese, allowed Paquin to return to Methuen after his treatment
to take courses on training to become a hospital chaplain. Even though
he was officially listed by the archdiocese as being on sick leave, Paquin
continued to study at Bon Secours Hospital in Methuen in 1991 and 1992
and was ministering to patients.

"Two weeks ago, I covered the entire week for Fr. Frank Murphy while
he went on vacation," Paquin wrote in March 1992. "I became
the hospital chaplain and I was proud of the good job I did. It was a
great teachable moment for me."

A few months later, in September 1992, an adult male whom Paquin had
met at the hospital filed a complaint against him with the archdiocese
for alleged inappropriate behavior.

Several months later, McCormack was approached by another youth who alleged
that he had been abused by Paquin years earlier, beginning when he was
a preteen at St. Monica's and continuing to the time he entered St. John's
Seminary. In addition to detailing the abuse he suffered, the seminarian
told McCormack that Paquin had taken up with another youth from the Haverhill
area while studying to become a hospital chaplain.

When confronted with the allegations, Paquin acknowledged to McCormack
that "he had done things wrong in the past," one memo said,
but asserted he had not abused any youths since undergoing treatment at
St. Luke's in 1990 and 1991 and was not molesting the Haverhill youth.

There is reason now to doubt that account. The person whom Paquin is
charged with raping - from 1989 to June 30, 1992 - in the indictments
issued by the Essex County grand jury was the Haverhill youth whom McCormack
had told Paquin to stay away from.

Through a spokesman, McCormack said he remembered recommending that Paquin
leave the priesthood, but without the documents in front of him, he could
recall little beyond that.

Paquin remained on sick leave through much of the 1990s. And as the archdiocese
fielded - and settled - the formal complaints of sexual misconduct against
him, some of his superiors expressed misgivings about Paquin remaining
a priest.

After being notified by a Brockton man that Paquin had allegedly abused
his son and nephew, who had AIDS, Flatley, then Law's delegate handling
allegations of clergy abuse, approached Law's top deputy, Bishop William
F. Murphy, in March 1996. "Bishop Murphy was very clear in his insistence
that it is time for Father Paquin to move away from the priesthood,"
Flatley wrote in a memorandum.

But Paquin began to press to be returned to ministry. The archdiocese
wanted him either to leave the priesthood altogether or at least give
up his lay job working at a CVS pharmacy in Milton, because it was putting
him in contact with children.

Flatley, after fielding a complaint from another past victim of Paquin,
wrote in a March 28, 1996 memo that "it is irresponsible for the
Archdiocese to allow him to be working where there are young people [at
CVS], given his history."

Paquin refused to leave the priesthood but agreed to leave the CVS job
if the archdiocese would consider allowing him to return to work as a
priest. He was no longer at risk, he assured church officials: He had
not been accused of molesting boys for years and was enrolled in an "after-care"
treatment program.

It was while he was working at CVS, and residing at Our Lady's Hall,
a Milton residential facility for troubled priests, that Paquin was allegedly
bringing a teenage Haverhill boy into Our Lady's Hall numerous times for
sexual encounters, according to a lawsuit against Paquin. That claim involves
the same person Paquin is now criminally accused of raping.

Yet in a meeting in January 1997, Paquin proposed to Bishop Murphy that
he be allowed to work with the Rev. C. Melvin Surette, then a research
assistant with the office handling clergy abuse, "in finding employment
within the Church," Murphy wrote.

Even though he had stated less than a year earlier that Paquin should
leave the priesthood because of the mounting complaints against him, Murphy
now wrote of Paquin's request to return to ministry: "I would be
very supportive of this."

Murphy, now a bishop in Rockville Centre on Long Island, N.Y., declined
comment.

He was not the only archdiocesan official willing to give Paquin another
chance. The Archdiocese's Review Board, a panel charged with investigating
sex abuse allegations against priests and recommending action to the cardinal,
had recommended in 1994 that Paquin seek "laicization." But
in May 1997, it voted to let him work again as a priest as long as it
"does not put him in contact with minors."

By September, Surette told his superiors that he had placed Paquin as
a chaplain at an archdiocese-sponsored elderly nursing home in Lynn. A
few months later, Surette had found a more prestigious assignment for
him, as chaplain at the Youville Hospital and Rehabilitation Center, a
position that would pay him $1,716 a month, $300 above what church pastors
were receiving.

In 1994, before Surette was assigned to the archdiocese's office dealing
with clergy abuse, the archdiocese settled a lawsuit that accused Surette
of abusing youths at Alpha Omega, a church-run treatment center for troubled
teenage boys in Littleton. Through his lawyer, Surette has denied the
allegation, but in recent weeks three other former occupants of the home
have filed suit alleging that Surette abused them during the time they
spent at Alpha Omega.

Law gave the archdiocese's official approval of the Paquin reassignment
with his July 1998 letter to the priest. "I am confident of your
ability to minister competently and compassionately to the community at
Youville," the cardinal wrote.

However, two years later, Law withdrew that support. Between May 1999
and September 2000, the archdiocese received five new complaints from
men who alleged that they had been abused by Paquin in the 1970s and 1980s,
when they were teenagers.

Among the complaints was one from a 38-year old Dracut man who told the
archdiocese that he was "shocked" to hear that Paquin was still
acting as a priest and chaplain, and demanded to be paid $250,000 or he
would take his case to the press.

Within months, at the Review Board's recommendation, Law told Paquin
that he was removing him from Youville and taking away his official authority
as a priest. In December 2000, Law wrote the Vatican asking that Paquin
be defrocked.

"Father Paquin has engaged in sexual molestation of numerous boys
since and before he was ordained" and 18 cases have already been
reported to the archdiocese, Law wrote Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary
of state for the Vatican. "It is my judgment that he is the cause,
potential and actual, of grave scandal."